[Gobsgraham]

Looking for some help from people much smarter than me. A few years ago my laptop got dropped and the hard drive died causing us to lose a lot of pictures.

Last week I was playing with it and was occasionally able to get the computer to recognize it but was still not able to actually get into any files on it.

Is it possible to buy an identical 320GB drive and swap the physical disk inside the hdd. Does it have to be identical make and size? I know I will likely have issues with dust and stuff but if there is any chance I could get those pictures back I will give it a shot.

Any advice is appreciated. If you do this for a living feel free to let me know what you would charge to do a disk swap or some other type of recovery.

Thanks